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Welcome to another currency report, which this time focuses on the last full week of trading before the festive break. How will the British pound do this week?

An overview of the currency markets for December 16th – December 20th 2013

On Monday morning the British pound was worth 1.6270 against the US dollar, but how long would that last? Things looked up early as it finished on 1.6325 by Monday evening. The pound then dipped back to 1.6259 by Tuesday evening, but that would be the worst news we would have all week. Indeed, by the time the entire week was over the British pound had managed to eke things back up to 1.6357, making it a successful week all in all.

Would we experience much the same against the Euro though? Here the British pound started off on 1.1852 and dropped back slightly to close Monday on 1.1850. It slid again the following day, settling on 1.1825 as a result. After that however it was all good news for the rest of the week. The British pound actually managed to increase its standing to 1.1978 by the time the markets closed for the week on Friday night. This gave us two good results so far, so could we add any more to this performance?

Let’s see how things turned out against the Hong Kong dollar now. The opening rate here was 12.614 and once again we saw an up and down pattern to start the week. The high point came on Thursday as we achieved a closing rate of 12.691 but as it turned out there was a reasonable closing rate on Friday too, this time of 12.684. This was better than we had started with, giving us yet more to celebrate.

Our fourth stop is in New Zealand, and here the starting rate was 1.9783. We followed a familiar pattern here as the early results over the first couple of days weren’t particularly good. By Tuesday evening the pound had slipped to 1.9661. This might have seemed disastrous at the time but by the end of the week we had long since forgotten this. Indeed, the final rate for the week turned out to be 2.0034 – the highest one of the lot.

Finally we come to a stop in Australia, where the pound began the week on 1.8199. By Monday evening this had improved to 1.8249. Although there was a dip the next day, this was the only bad result we had all week. In fact by Friday evening the pound had managed to improve to close on 1.8453.

Notable events in the world of currency

Another excellent outcome against the Canadian dollar

Here the pound improved from 1.7335 to finish on 1.7489 on Friday.

The pound rises again

The pound managed another good result against the Swiss franc as well. It rose from 1.4490 to 1.4689 across the week.

Three out of three

Over in Iceland the pound managed to improve from 190.573 to close Friday evening on 192.880.

So it was all good news for the British pound this time around, as you can see from the results above. With two shorter weeks coming up for the Christmas and New Year holidays, it was heartening to see we could at least go into this period of the year in good form. It remains to be seen how long we can keep this up for. Good weeks don’t usually tag together for long periods of time, so it might be we have to cope with poorer results over the festive period. Only time will tell whether this is the case or not.

Until then we can celebrate the good results we have had this week and ponder on the future. With 2014 only a short distance away, we can at least hope for good results to get us there. It remains to be seen what will happen after that. We will be back soon with more results for you.